Algorithmic Behavior
Tablet 3:
Hello, Ellie. I hope you are doing well. I hope you do not mind my being pedantic for a few paragraphs before I get to my point. If you do mind, just tell me in your next letter, and I won’t do it again.
Math used to be much more concrete. A person weighed as much as ten bushels of corn; a piece of wood was the length of two forearms placed finger to elbow; a cart traveled at the speed of one horse, perhaps two.
While kilograms and centimeters are theoretically based on water and pendulums, and while cars can have the power of hundreds of horses, these units are so far removed from their physical foundations that, for all practical purposes, the units have become abstracted.
I think that most adult situations progress in the opposite direction―from abstract to concrete, sometimes omitting the abstract altogether. For example, I tell you that I am fond of you, and then I bring you flowers. Or I just bring you flowers in the first place. I tell you I am pregnant, and then I let you feel my stomach.
If I pay you a visit, you will know that I care without my having to state it. Would you mind if I paid you a visit?
Tam had known since kindergarten that she would go into math. Given ten beans and told to “explore” with them (she had gone to a charter school), she had put one bean on top of the other and tried to press the top one into the bottom one. They did not snap together like she had hoped.
“When you put them on top of each other, they’re still two,” she had said to her teacher.
“You’re adding!” the teacher had said. “One and one is always two.”
Tam liked the sound of ‘always’ and its implication that something would repeat itself indefinitely given the right conditions.
Note to self:: How to connect to your body’s partially formed replication of yourself: (Note: I will call it a “she,” though it is not really any sex yet.) Find the things you have in common. Like her, your cells are dividing. She consumes your food; you too consume your food. Your blood goes through both of you. Like you, her body simply follows instructions and makes copies. It is good at what it does, and so are you. One day though, the child may be good at something else.
Fact: The state of limerence, an obsessive and involuntary form of romantic love, can persist for years if the love is not mutual but the limerent person believes that it, someday, could be.
As Tam packed the fourth tablet, wrapping it in old editions of the departmental bulletin and centering it in a synthetic nest, she wondered if this was crazy. She stepped back to look at the situation.
“I have been writing secrets and feelings on clay, putting that clay in more clay, putting the sum of the clay in a box, sending it through a government agency to a woman I don’t know who doesn’t know me, and hoping that this will simultaneously comfort me and revive a relationship that was never quite what I wanted it to be in the first place,” she thought. “My actions do, in fact, resemble those of an insane person.”
These thoughts were smoothed by the sandpaper knowledge that people often act irrationally when they have strong emotions; maybe not “often” but “always.”
